Encore Cinema Out Takes

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Thursday, April 09, 2015

I am too picky about pictures like this — I mean those with
“based on a true story” disclaimers prefacing a movie that dramatizes the lives
of real people and real events.

I accept the notion that certain liberties (dramatic
license) will be taken in order to enhance the story-telling.Characters may be embellished or eliminated
or combined into one person, events can be telescoped or re-arranged to fit
into the time limits.

But aren’t there limits, rules that the dramatist should follow,
especially when dealing with a historically or culturally important person or
event? Oliver Stone has been accused of crossing this imaginary line in NIXON
and JFK. Of course the most notorious and often cited abuses are Griffith’s
BIRTH OF A NATION and Riefenstall’s TRIUMPH OF THE WILL. Both of these films
are considered masterpieces, landmarks of cinema art because of their
outstanding technical achievements in editing, pacing, and emotional impact.
But as documents purporting to tell true stories, they are tragically flawed.
Both contain many blatant lies, distorting the events and people depicted so
much that they should be labeled propaganda.

The line between a true story and propaganda includes the
intent of the artist, of course. Griffith was trying to glorify the heroes of
his Southern youth, the Klansmen who “defended white rights” in the post Civil
War era. Riefenstall was selling her patrons, Hitler, Goebbels, and the other
Nazi leaders of Germany. Oliver Stone had an agenda, too. His bitterness about
the 1960’s is a recurring theme of his films and his paranoia saturates his
work.

Alan Turing is a fascinating person, a fit subject for
dramatic treatment. Although he died sixty years ago, his story involves two
issues that concern us today: computers and the plight of homosexuals. Turing,
like many geniuses, had colorful eccentricities. In an academic paper, he
imagined a “thinking machine” that seemed to foresee the computer age. In World
War II, he used his genius as part of the Bletchley Park secret code and cypher
school to create a calculating machine (the Bombe) and other techniques (called
Banburisms) that aided in breaking the Enigma code.

Turing’s work during the war was known to very few because
of the secrecy required. After the war, he taught in Manchester and while there
continued his occasional sorties to underground gay bars. He met men and boys
and brought some to his digs. One of them burglarized his home, and stole his
father’s watch. Turing reported the burglary to the local police, and told them
that he suspected one of the young men who had done it. The police knew the bar
and instead of pursuing the theft, arrested Turing for the same crime that
Oscar Wilde had committed.

Turing was offered a choice by the judge: prison or undergo
a treatment that was considered a cure of homosexuality. He chose that; large
doses of estrogen, known as chemical castration. He lost his security
clearance, his sex drive, grew breasts, and felt depressed and humiliated.
Eventually, he committed suicide by ingesting cyanide.

Fifty years later, his achievements were finally recognized,
both as to computers and the war work. The homosexual laws were by now repealed
and the government apologized to his memory.

That is a terrific story, an important one to tell.

So why did the filmmakers feel compelled to lie to us in
important as well as trivial details and fail to focus enough on the real
drama?

The first disturbing distortion is the depiction of Turing
as seeming to suffer from some form of mental illness like Asberger’s. He is
shown to be socially inept, obsessive compulsive (as a student he carefully
separates his peas from carrots on his dinner plate, is ridiculed and tortured
by classmates).According to most
witnesses, this is a gross exaggeration. He was eccentric, but by no means was
he anti-social. He had many friends, had a sense of humor, was polite (in a
professorial way).

The filmmakers decided to use the formula of A BEAUTIFUL
MIND (which had its own significant distortions) and Turing becomes a sort of
John Nash. In fact, they contrive scenes in pubs in which he shows his social
awkwardness and then suddenly hits upon the key to break the code that reminded
me of similar scenes in A BEAUTIFUL MIND.

The second distortion was the fictional character of Detective
Nock, who is insulted by Turing who says he does not want the burglary pursued.
This is not true. Turing reported the burglary in the naïve belief that the
police would want to solve the crime rather than punish him for his honesty
admitting his homosexual acts.

The entire plot of Nock deciding that Turing’s secret must
be that he is a Soviet spy is complete nonsense.

The same is true of the egregious fiction related to
Alastair Denniston that almost amounts to malicious slander of the man’s
reputation. Denniston was a career codebreaker, having served in World War I in
Room 40 the famous British team that broke the German code in that war. Their
work was responsible for bringing the U.S. in that war when they translated the
Zimmermann Telegram that showed German intentions to side with Mexico in a war
against the U.S.

Denniston (played by
Charles Dance, a frequent film villain, usually as an upper class snob) is
depicted as hating Turing, accusing him of being a Soviet spy, and then trying
to fire him.

In truth, Denniston had recruited and consulted Turing and
many other academics even before September 1939. When the war started, Turing
was hired full time. Denniston did have disagreements with Turing and others
and eventually was replaced in the job, but he didn’t accuse Turing of spying.
That is simply invented to spice up the plot and add conflict.

John Cairncross (played by Alan Leech) was not one of the
team in Hut 8. He was at Bletchley but probably never met or knew of Turing. In
1951, he was revealed to be a Soviet spy. The scene in which Turing discovers
his secret and Cairncross threatens to expose Turing’s is a total fabrication.

The same is true of Stewart Menzies (the head of MI6 –
played by Mark Strong). In the movie, Turing tells Menzies about Cairncross.
Menzies says he knows all about it and uses Cairncross to relate secrets to the
Soviets because Churchill foolishly refuses to do so. This is completely
untrue.

In truth, Menzies was fooled by all of the Cambridge Five –
the traitors who were his friends and colleagues for many years. He refused to
believe that he had been deceived by people of his own class and education.

There are other distortions that are more or less
significant. Hugh Alexander (Matthew Goode) is not given enough credit for his
contributions. Turing didn’t build The Bombe alone – Gordon Welchman helped him
to build the first one.

“He had also been
busy devising a machine, called the Bombe, after the Bomby, although it was a
more complex piece of equipment than its Polish namesake. This would test the
encyphered messages against commonly used streams of text – known to the
codebreakers as cribs – to narrow down the possibilities for the keys, settings
and wheel orders of the Enigma machines. Turing enjoyed a good degree of
progress
on both. Menzies agreed funding of £100,000 for the construction of the first
Bombes and the British Tabulating Machinery company (BTM) was commissioned to
build it, with the work supervised by the BTM research director Harold ‘Doc’
Keen. Then in December 1939, Turing managed to work out the indicator systems
for five days of pre-war Naval Enigma traffic.”

One thing the movie does almost get right is the clue
(called a crib) that led to the first successes in breaking the Naval Code. One
of the women whose task was to listen to and record Morse code transmissions
noticed that the operator was using the same letters – probably a girlfriend’s
initials – as identifiers at the start of each message. This was a violation of
German protocol that ordered using random letters, changed every day. Once the
codebreakers had this head start their task was easier.

But it was by no means the breakthrough that won the war.
Many more Bombes were built to shorten the calculating time and when the
Germans distributed a new Enigma machine that was even more complex, the
British were lucky to capture one along with codebook from a German ship – and
to keep it all secret.

The movie oversimplifies and flattens a complex story. In so
doing, they reduce heroism and tragedy into a trite movie formula. The hope is
always that people will be intrigued enough by the subject matter that they
will seek the whole truth but the fear is that movies will become the legend
and then will become history.

Sunday, March 01, 2015

This movie
taught me a few valuable lessons, especially after listening to director David
Fincher’s commentary track. I love mysteries, especially the classics that are old fashioned, linear, following a
detective uncovering clues to crimes as they occur or those of the cold case
variety. A rich and powerful family concealing their dirty secrets. Scenes are
salted with juicy suspects, and there is an enormous amount of exposition
required in order to be fair to the viewer so that we experience what the
detective does.

The genre
is more difficult to carry off than a straight thriller, in which we share the
culprit’s point of view as well, and the tension comes not from anticipating a
whodunit reveal, but in the hero vs antihero chase. The viewer need not think
too much to figure things out; just sit back and veg out while the bodies pile
up.

The straight
mystery genre has retreated in recent years because filmmakers have no
confidence that audiences have patience or willingness to concentrate long
enough to solve complex puzzles. The genre includes long periods of relative inaction,
which the best filmmakers used to fill with character and something called “suspense.”

But today’s
action films jettison suspense and resort to characters derived from comics and
video games whose traits are so familiar, there is no need to develop them
further. The only mystery left is how many henchmen are going to be wasted on
route to the violent CGI laced climax.

The mystery
genre has gone the way of the western and the musical comedy. It barely
survives on TV, in formula police procedurals and gimmicky quirky takeoffs of
the Agatha Christie or Sherlock Holmes models.

Added to
those hurdles, Steven Zallian’s script adapts the first of Stieg Larsson’s
Swedish best seller series of books which already had been translated into many
languages, including English, and also made into a hit film in Swedish. The
book and film was much admired and the solution of the mystery had been widely
told. The lead characters, Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomqvist, had already
become “iconic” characters and were repeated in Larsson’s sequels.

So Fincher
had many problems to solve.

He doesn’t
solve all the problems. In fact, he adds another one. The casting of Stellan
Skaarsgard (Ronin) as one of the suspects was a problem for my enjoyment of the
mystery. He is too important an actor to be a minor character. This is a clue
that any devotee of the film genre should see. I was able to discern quickly
that he was the killer.

The Harriet
mystery runs up against a similar problem. Harriet is presumed to be dead and
we are told that the aim is to find out who killed her. But she disappeared
forty years ago, and no body was ever found. In this genre this always raises
the probability that we are being deceived: she is not dead, but is one of the
other characters and that other secrets are beneath the disappearance.

A third problem lies in the need to
make the plot relevant to today’s concerns. Sexual abuse (all abuse but
particularly, of girls or women) is a popular cliché of modern crime films. Sex
perverts / serial killers are also rampant in today’s mystery-thrillers. The
character of Lisbeth is iconic because of her attraction as a sort of superhero
to girls and women. She is damaged as a victim of incestuous sex abuse and we
know, while watching her suffer additional abuse, that she is going to have her
revenge.

We know
more about her than any other character and she is an extreme symbol for
empowered young adult females and a warning to anyone who isn’t. At 12, she
killed her tormenting father and since, has been a ward of the courts until, at
23, she has become a far more complex character. She is “different” looking –
punkish, gothy, facial piercings, and of course tattoos.

She wears
her anti-social almost autistic attitude with a brooding arrogance that
teenagers adore. She is intelligent, gifted with a photographic memory, and
techno-hip nerd genius who can hack into any computer or security system to
gain access to data she needs to solve the case. Of course she hates authority,
macho males, judgmental adults.

She is
bisexual but defensive, closed off emotionally, and fiercelt private. She has a
tenacity borne of rage and obsession about justice and retribution. This makes
her a worthy heir of the Sherlock Holmes brand of sleuth.

Salander’s
character is so fully formed and fascinating that the other characters are mere
sketches. Even Blomqvist, played by Daniel Craig, a male actor with great presence,
is almost reduced to a sidekick, who must be saved by her. This in itself is
something of a breakthrough in fiction.

The “damsel
in distress” is no more. GONE GIRL took the femme fatale to another level.
DRAGON TATTOO now eliminates the manic pixie dream girl.

As in
Batman, there is not enough oxygen for Commissioner Gordon or anyone else to
fascinate viewers. The best superheroes face a supervillain. Batman has The
Joker and Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger showed important that was.

A problem
with the sort of superhero who is supposed to be existing in a real world —
rather than a Gotham or Metropolis — is that real world crimes like sexual
abuse are too real. These predators are not trying to take over the world like
a Bond villain. They do not come from other galaxies or times or mythologies.
They are not foreign terrorists with beady eyes.

In real
life, the abusers may be our priests, bosses, teachers, neighbors, or even
close nurturing loved ones we trust and need.

Batman
trumped Superman by acknowledging his dark side in seeking vengeance rather
than the lukewarm ideals of “truth, justice, and the American way.” Now, Liam
Neeson (TAKEN) kills the abductors of his daughter. He is the follower of Clint
Eastwood (DIRTY HARRY) and Charles Bronson (DEATH WISH). These also spawned
movie franchises that traded on the populist revulsion with violent predatory
criminals that dominated the law and order demands the 1970’s and 80’s and
continue to provide answers to such fears and wishes.Salander satisfies the modern audience’s lust
for revenge against male victimizers of women.

One reason
for the popularity of these revenge movies is the widespread belief that justice
is denied in the real world. Media saturation assures us that our justice
system can’t prevent or punish these predators. This is not a new phenomenon.
The gangster movies of the 1930’s were “torn from headlines” about real life
criminals like “Scarface” Al Capone, Bonny and Clyde, John Dillinger, Baby Face
Nelson.

Villains of
literature often represent current social nightmares. Grimm’s tales codified
the fears of town dwellers about dangers lurking in the forests. Victims of the
early flickers were often the familiar ones of stage melodramas, landlords who
held the mortgage and leered at the maiden with an offer to save her family by
yielding to his lust.

Immigrants
who lived in crowded tenements and others who were moving from the country to
the city found plenty of other predators there. The rich, the powerful, the
reckless playboys, the factory foreman; all were sources of villainy that the
moving pictures exposed as sexual predators.

In the
early 30’s, the era known as “pre-code,” the early talkies revealed a new kind
of woman, one who overcame the label of victim by using her sexuality to survive
and even to dominate her would-be predators.

UNBROKEN

After so
many recent movies that revel in the violent pleasure of serving the cold dish
of revenge, it would seem that a film that prizes forgiveness of even the most
heinous crimes might be refreshing and uplifting.

But, sorry,
not this one.

As I
watched it, I knew I was being led into hatred of the villains (particularly
the lead villain (Corporal Watanabe), and now, after being told to forgive, I
do not feel redeemed. Rather, I admit to resenting being deprived of the
satisfaction that the revenge films accords. But I don’t feel guilty about that
feeling in this particular case and I’ll explain why.

Unbroken is an Angelina Jolie directed
film of the Laura Hillenbrand best seller about Louis Zamperini, the
Italian-American 1936 Olympic runner, B-24 bombadier, survivor of 47 days on a
life raft and two plus years as a POW in Japan.

Eschewing
the usual disclaimers (“based on” . . . etc.), Jolie opts for a bold claim
that it is “A true story” - period - as her preface. My research suggests that the phrase is
accurate . . . as far as it goes.
She shows the details of his ordeal at sea in vivid detail, which is
disturbing and impressive as a document of the man’s will to live. But that is
merely a first act to his sternest test: the years of his captivity, including
unending sadistic abuse and mistreatment by Corporal Watanabe, the evil camp commandant
who wants to break him. The
dramatization ends with the liberation at the war’s end, and Zamperini’s
welcome home to his family.

The
character traits that allowed him to survive are laid out clearly enough in
flashbacks to his youth. A child who is naturally stubborn, introverted, and
contrary, he fights bigoted school boys and is on the way to reform school
until his older brother convinces him to try the track team. To impress girls,
Luis agrees, and then finds he has a talent for long distance running. His
brother adds the element of discipline by pushing him to levels beyond his
apparent limits.

His running
style is a metaphor for his character, or at least good training for his coming
crises: to come from behind in distance races after his opponents have
exhausted themselves. He is able to draw upon a reservoir of strength to endure
tremendous pain.

In the
prison camp, he is given another key piece of wisdom. When he expresses his
hatred for the tormenting Japanese sadist and desire to kill him even if he
would be executed for it, a fellow prisoner tells him that his job is to
survive; that will be your victory, your revenge.

A brief
epilog tells (not shows) us that after the war he became a Christian and turned
from revenge to forgiveness. It shows the real man at age 80 running in a race
in Japan. He lived well into his 90’s. We are told (not shown) that Watanabe
escaped punishment by evading capture and then obtaining amnesty. We are informed that he refused to meet with
Zamperini later in life to accept his prisoner’s forgiveness. We are meant to
infer that his captor was the broken man.

My own
cursory research expands on these facts. While not controverting any of the
claimed “true facts,” the facts which were not included in the film include
some which might have challenged the intended theme and thus made a more
meaningful movie.

Apparently,
after the happy ending depicted in the movie, the courageous and mentally tough
Zamperini suffered from nightmares for many years, part of what we would now
call post traumatic stress. He survived that, too, by finding religious faith.
He became a part of Billy Graham’s Christian crusades, lecturing about his
ordeals. Through his conversion, he decided to forgive his tormentors in order
to find peace. He claimed that some of the prison guards he later met and
forgave became Christians as a result. He lived a long and useful life.

The epilog
of Watanabe’s journey, however, would not fit into such a nice Hollywood
ending. He was interviewed later in life, when Zamperini’s story was being told
to the next generation in Japan. Like the Nazi war criminal, Dr. Josef Mengele,
Watanabe had come from a wealthy family. After years in hiding, he had become
respectable, wealthy, comfortable.

When
interviewed in the mid 1990’s, he was unrepentant about the harshness of his
treatment of American prisoners, asserting his mantra that they were enemies of
Japan and deserved no better. He owed no apology and did not seek forgiveness. He
thus justified his cruelty and denied any sense of defeat.

I think
that might have made a better story. Certainly, it is one that would have
elicited more interest — for me, at least. I have been fascinated by stories
involving the frustrating search for Nazi war criminals to prosecute. I hate
the fact that leaders of nations and churches abetted the crimes, concealed the
criminals, and conspired to deny justice to victims and escaped even societal censure.
They not only survived. They went on as if nothing happened, while their
victims lived with the nightmares and sense of guilt that the criminals never
faced.

I am
appalled by the arguments that excuse those who committed such heinous crimes
as soldiers following orders. I don’t understand how amnesty can apply to such
crimes or how a statute of limitations can estop prosecution for murders of
hundreds, thousands, or millions, when it there is no limitation in law for
punishing a murderer of one person.

I spent a lifetime
defending accused murderers and specialized in finding arguments against
executing them as punishment for their crimes. Yet, I never argued as a matter
of principle or morality that no person ever deserved to die for crimes. The
issue for me always depends on the individual, the motives, the procedure for
finding the truth, the rules and evidence and fairness of the system devised to
make the decision.

One
self-truth I have to admit is that I am Jewish. The Holocaust is very personal
to me. When I am forced to see the proof of the worst crimes ever perpetrated,
I cannot deny that those responsible — and I mean ALL of those responsible —
should be prosecuted and punished by their execution.

The purpose
is not revenge, not a biblical notion of an eye for an eye, or as a matter of
lynching from hatred and rage. My purpose would not be as a deterrence. It is
really a simple matter of justice.

And so I
would not forgive Sargent Watanabe. Even if forgiving him provides closure for
his victim and even if giving him amnesty serves the purpose of Japanese –
American politics. Not even if he did express remorse. To me, his crimes are
unforgivable and civilization should demand that he forfeit his right to exist.

Thursday, July 24, 2014

By now, even casual movie lovers know about the “meet cute,” Billy Wilder’s name for the first duty of romantic comedy film makers – introducing eventual lovers in a clever manner. But the finish to the romance — whether happily or — rarely but memorably melancholy — the chase to the finish is the most common end cute, which has become one of the tritest of trite romantic comedy cliches --- the frenetic pulse pounding intrusively soaring music-scored race to the (almost always) happy ending.

Near the end of Act III, somewhere around the 90 minute mark, shortly after the boy has lost the girl or the girl lost the boy, or (in this century) the boy the boy, or the girl the girl, the realization hits one or the other or both of them what the audience has long known and in the best of the genre, yearned for — that they really, really, really are – after all – meant for each other!

. . . He races to the hotel just in time for their New Year’s kiss (WHEN HARRY MET SALLY) ... She races to the boat to sail with him (HOLIDAY) ... She races down the street and climbs the stairs to THE APARTMENT ... They both race to the top of the Empire State Building (SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE) ... He chases her down the street (SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK) ... He chases her bus with his car (LOVE AND OTHER DRUGS) ... He climbs her fire escape (PRETTY WOMAN) ... He chases her to a beach in New England (WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS) ... And maybe the most famous chase of all, he races to the church accompanied by Simon and Garfunkel (THE GRADUATE).

Billy Wilder (with partner Charles Brackett) wrote one of my favorite meet cutes for Ernst Lubitsch to direct Gary Cooper and Claudette Colbert in BLUEBEARD’S 8TH WIFE. In a department store, they each crave a certain pair of pajamas, but she wants only the bottoms and he needs just the tops. A tantalizing thought for 1938.

Lubitsch didn’t prefer heart stopping endings. His classic, THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER, is a model for how to carry off genre tropes that have stood the test of time. They begin in mutual dislike, deny their mutual attraction, a secret intervenes, and just when it seems hopeless, they discover and admit their love for each other.

When Nora Ephron wrote and directed the remake, YOU’VE GOT MAIL, she wisely kept all the beats and eschewed the chase to the end, relying instead on a more leisurely stroll to a city park. As with Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan in the Lubitsch template, Ephron could rely on the charm and chemistry of her stars, Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, to close the deal.

Wilder gave in to the chase scene in two of his best, THE APARTMENT, and SOME LIKE IT HOT, in each case having the girls — Shirley MacLaine and Marilyn Monroe --- both clothed in fur collar coats, race to the climax.

When I watch these films rush to the inevitable finale, I find myself wondering what all the fuss is about. Most of the running seems unnecessary — if this were real life in which logical rules might apply. He has to stop her from boarding that plane (or in the old days, train) and leaving his life. Of course, in a sane world not accompanied by frantic underscoring, he could hop on the next plane or train which merely would delay the happy ending by a few hours.

Admittedly, there are a few plots in which delay might be a nuisance. IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT and THE GRADUATE both had the brides leaving the wrong guy at the altar in order to chase after their true loves. But even in the wide world of movie clichés, a bad marriage is rarely an insurmountable obstacle.

The re-marriage sub-genre of romances is replete with second chances of this sort. THE PHILADELPHIA STORY is a classic example: rebounding from the bas first marriage to the right guy, the stubborn heroine is saved at the brink of the altar from the awful misstep of a wrong guy marriage by the re-marriage to the right guy.

Even in a more modern story telling style, like FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL, the wrong guy marriage is merely a temporary setback rather than foreclosure of true romance.

The frantic overly music-scored pursuit strikes me as a cheap device which is stolen from that other enduring but cliché ridden genre, the action thriller. Car chases are the most common set pieces of thrillers as well as slapstick comedies, going as far back as the earliest days of silent movies when Keystone Kops careened over Los Angeles streets chasing Keaton, Langdon, Hardy and Laurel.

The classic one in BULLIT stood on its own for suspense, gradually quickening pace, and only at the climax, an explosive crescendo of violence. As with all examples, the imitators have had to up the ante each time until all sorts of CGI vehicles litter the freeways in every thriller. (This has happened over and over again in the history of films. Another clear example is PSYCHO, which spawned the slasher genre.)

I am usually bored with chases in any genre and when watching with a remote in my hand, I make liberal use of the FF button. After all, in the thriller genre, there is not a moment when I doubt that the protagonists will survive the carnage, disposing of all of the stunt workers whose cars are overturned, riddled with shells, forced into oil tankers or over the sides of elevated highways. This is merely akin to a level in a video game in which countless minions of evil are eliminated — just momentary obstacles en route ... to the next level . . . and the next. . . .

So, why take a device such as the chase from the thriller genre into light romances? I think it is often a failure of imagination or courage. Film makers are often trying to inject into the romantic comedy genre some sense of suspense which is lacking from their story telling. Perhaps these “auteurs” are embarrassed by the commercial nature of their project and wish to put a personal stamp on it, to prove that a director was involved and Action is a director’s forte.

An inherent problem in the genre is the almost certain knowledge that the satisfying ending will included professions or admissions of love. But many makers of the genre are too embarrassed — or are incapable of or too lazy — to write the sort of scene that Lubitsch admired, closing with wit and charm.

Cameron Crowe was an exception. He wrote and directed one of the better ones for JERRY MAGUIRE. But maybe the almost too sentimental lines, “You complete me,” and “You had me at hello,” are too risky or too embarrassing for most film makers to dare.

Another annoying lazy rom-com device is the “lyrical moment,” usually placed somewhere in Act II, when the lovers are beginning to fall in love and need to share intimate details in conversation with each other. Rather than writing witty repartee for the pair, the auteur’s camera draws away and admires the scenery while the orchestra or pop song tells us how to feel ... and we watch the montage of strolls in the park, ferry rides, or other date nights, usually culminating in the tastefully (for PG13) sex scene. (Whenever I saw such movies while with my own date, I found myself wishing for the intrusion of a soundtrack to relieve me from the obligation being witty or revealing to my date, especially while my mind was “racing” to the hoped-for, more R rated, climax!)

A successful exception to this practice are the Linklater / Hawke / Delpy “BEFORE ...” trilogy, in which the essence of these films consists of these walk-and-talk witty and character revealing conversations.

Wilder, who I cited as one who resorted to chases in his two most famous romantic comedies, had the talent to write (with I.A.L. Diamond) great unsentimental closing lines: in THE APARTMENT, when “Baxter” professes his love, “Miss Kubelik” tells him: “Shut up and deal;” and in SOME LIKE IT HOT, “Osgood,” informed that “Daphne” is a man, responds: “Well, nobody’s perfect.”

Only a few film makers escaped the oldest cliché of romantic comedies, the finale in which boy gets girl with its accompanying kiss at the fade out. In some notable exceptions, the formula was discarded: boy loses girl ... period!

The most famous of this rare variant is ROMAN HOLIDAY, in which princess Audrey Hepburn returns to her duty and newspaperman lover Gregory Peck walks away from the castle, to the fade out.

In the 90's, MY BEST FRIEND’S WEDDING had Julia Roberts losing her friend / desired lover to Cameron Diaz and accepting friendship as the next best thing.

Kevin Smith’s cult Indie classic CHASING AMY created a new variable. For a new audience, Smith had Ben Affleck forced to choose between his best bro’, Jason Lee, and his lover, Joey Lauren Adams, while she rejected both of them, citing their immaturity and her preference for women.

Smith foreshadowed the contemporary sub-genre of romantic comedies in which the girl is far more adult than the boy, a variant which Judd Apatow has perfected in this century.